I've Been Thinking About This…

Going through some old blogs in Bloglines, I bumped into one by Tony Morgan that pointed to a site that evaluates spiritual giftedness. That site starts with the passages in the New Testament that refer to spiritual gifts (Romans 12:3-8; 1 Corinthians 12:1-31; 1 Corinthians 14:1-40; Ephesians 4:7-16; 1 Peter 4:7-11) and builds a list of those gifts, then asks a lot of questions (125 in all) designed to draw out your gifts. It’s all a bit Myers-Briggs-ish (not a bad thing – INTJ here three times in a row). I don’t see it as the complete be-all and end-all, because I think that neither Paul nor Peter was doing anything more than giving a list of examples of giftedness – those listed weren’t God’s full list; if they were, they’d all be listed every time.

However, it does give an indication of inclination to certain ministries based on the gifts it draws out. My church uses a list similar to this in the SHAPE class that we have everyone take when they become a member. So just for griggles and gins, I took it again. It only takes about 10-15 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, the areas that take no major physical effort were my high scores – Wisdom, Apostle, Leadership, Shepherd, Administration, Knowledge & Teaching. Mid-range were the more physical gifts – Missionary, Voluntary Poverty, Giving, Evangelism, Service, Hospitality & Helps (Service was dead center!), and the purely spiritual were mostly and pathetically waaay down at the bottom – although I was surprised that Prophecy, Exhortation and Faith fell above the physical gifts.

Give it a go – what are your high points? Spill the beans in the comments below.

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Something just popped into my head.

When you go to an evangelical-minded church, occasionally (or frequently or every Sunday) the preacher there will have an altar call. And how does he conduct it? He says the old ritual lines – ‘every head bowed, every eye closed. This is nobody else’s business – just between you and the Lord – yes, I see those hands…’ and so on.

And what I want to know all of a sudden is, WHY? Why are all the heads bowed? Why are all the eyes closed? And above all, Why is it nobody else’s business?

Shouldn’t everyone SEE who’s coming to the Lord? SEE who’s thrown off the chains? SEE who’s going to join them in Heaven? Isn’t this a time of God’s glory manifesting itself in the salvation and redemption of a sinner?

And shouldn’t those who are raising their hands want to jump up on their chairs and shout, “Woo-ha! I’m saved for all eternity by the Blood of the Lamb!!!!!” ? (Woo-ha is in the Christian dictionary, I’m sure. See the section on “speaking in tongues”.)

And shouldn’t the rest of the church be looking and seeing and clapping and rejoicing over the salvation of someone “once lost, but now found”?

The angels certainly go nuts –

What’s with the eyes closed and doing this in secret? Sure, it makes it easier for the timid to put up their hands. But I have an ugly suspicion that it’s a procedure being followed by the preacher for that very reason – so that he can gain some converts that he may otherwaise not be able to count.

I’ve always sensed that this was a silly or even childish practice. Now I think it through, I think it’s a very dangerous one as well.

We are called to tell the world about Jesus and bring them to Him. Good grief! If we can’t acknowledge Jesus as our Lord and Saviour in church of all places, how can we do it in the World?

Am I missing something here?

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I was reading Dave Ferguson’s blog yesterday – he quoted some great words from a book by Roland Allen titled The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church. There are several quotes, but here’s the one that caught my eye:

Many years ago my experience in China taught me that if our object was to establish in that country a church which might spread over the six provinces which then formed the diocese of North China, that object could only be attained if the first Christians who were converted by our labors understood clearly that they could by themselves, without any further assistance from us, not only convert their neighbors, but establish churches. That meant that the very first groups of converts must be so fully equipped with all spiritual authority that they could multiply themselves without any necessary reference to us…

(my bold)

These are words that could as readily be applied to the church today – and 1,500 years ago. The book The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity Can Reach the West…Again… documents the way in which St Patrick was able to reach the Irish by adapting evangelistic methods to the indigenous people in Ireland and it spread like wildfire – and leapt back through Scotland and England and was starting back on the Continent when the Roman-based church put a stop to it – “That’s not the way we do it”.

We’re in the midst of a new way of ‘doing’ church that didn’t really get underway until the 1980s. For the first time since the first century, we are encouraging people to begin new churches without going through seminary first, and – by golly – they are! And we’ve got lots of ways of doing it. There are liturgical churches and anti-liturgical ones. There’s hippie radical worship (a VERY old congregation there!), and there’s churches that meet in pubs. It’s so terribly easy to criticize the way one group of people does church – so easy to promote the idea that REAL worship means getting dressed up in your best clothes out of respect for the Lord, and do not even think about bringing coffee into the service!

Don’t confuse method with message. As long as the message is true – let the method evolve, say I. What say you?

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I’m not a big people-person. I’m an introvert.

The people I like, I like. But there are people I find it hard to like. The EGRs. The rough. The cynics. The cruel. The selfish. The bitter. The whiners. The broken.

People who are broken are sharp and prickly. They’re difficult. They interrupt conversations, or are opinionated or worse – they disagree with me.

The thing is, though: People who are broken were broken by others who were broken. Broken people break people.

So if broken people break people, who heals people? Healed people do, of course. You didn’t see Jesus going around breaking people – He went in the other direction and healed them (if they’d let Him).

I spoke about this last week in church (shameless self-promotional plug! – To Speak of Grace) as part of our stewardship series, and used a hospital analogy: If I break my arm, I don’t go to the bowling alley, I go where I know I can get help to get better – to a hospital. I don’t go to a philosopher or a witch-doctor, because they can’t help in this situation. Healing comes from a doctor. Similarly, when I need spiritual healing, I go to a spiritual hospital – which the Church is designed to be. The problem is, we’re sick of churches. We keep hearing about how they’re run by people who have not acted in a Godly manner – pastors or priests who have been abusive, or adulterous, or greedy. It’s hard to separate the institution from those who make themselves its figureheads.

But the Church has always been God’s sole design for the spiritual hospital, and it always will be. Pursuing this analogy further, the medical staff is headed up by Jesus, and – for those who can only say, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” – there are ambulances. We are the ambulance. When someone is so lost and broken that they can’t (or won’t or even daren’t) get to church, we are sent out into the world to rescue those broken souls.

Which brings me back to the broken and to my comfort zone.

There are certain people that fit very readily into my comfort zone. Nice people. It’s true for each of us – you too! We’re very good at inviting the people we like to church; in fact, we quite comfortably invite friends who are already going to other churches to come to ours instead, because ours is ‘more alive’, or ‘has better worship music’, or ‘great preaching’. We’re actively pushing them to join us.

If you’re wealthy, or good-looking, or charismatic, or popular then – just like high school – you make the in-crowd. We want you. If you’re not one of those, but you’re useful, or hard-working, or clever then well, OK, we’ll tolerate you.

But if you’re noisy, or over-emotional, or have bad breath, or wear the same clothes all the time, or exhibit some other social lack; if you’re homeless, or an addict, or abusive, or a hooker then would you please stay away? You’ll mess it up for the rest of us. You don’t fit in our comfort zone.

I might expand my comfort zone for old people, or – up to a point – even for noisy tots, but not for you. You’re broken.

The problem is: The ones I don’t want in my comfort zone … are the very people Jesus does want.

The people I think will totally mess up my church … are the ones Jesus says it’s there for.

He hung out with the homeless, the beggars, the prostitutes, the adulterers, the maimed, the forgotten, the side-lined.

The keys to His church were carried by smelly wet lower-class fishermen and by reformed Quisling-style tax-collectors. He accepted water from an adulterous woman and foot washing from a prostitute. He healed lepers and sent them to the temple. He healed blind people, lame people, crippled people, unclean people, demon-possessed people. His admiration was spent on the sacrifice of a widow who gave her last farthing to the temple; on the faith of a soldier of the occupation forces, and on the importunity of a gentile Syro-Phoenician mother.

These aren’t the people who should be getting into the church, right?

Wrong.

They need hospital. They’re broken. And when we deny them access – either actively by saying, “You’re not invited” when they show up at the hospital, or passively by failing to send the ambulance out to invite them – we’re not healing them. And if we’re not healing, we’re allowing the breaking to continue. And if we allow it to continue, we’re one of the breakers. And if we’re one of the breakers, we must still be broken ourselves.

What if we went out to the broken people and urged them to come to church with us – to sit beside us in church – with the same enthusiasm with which we urge our friends to come?

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I’ve been thinking about churches recently – reading a lot about church leadership, following some of the great leaders’ blogs and twitters, thinking about how churches start and about how they come to an end. I suppose there are some that shut down by being called to do so, just as they started up. But I can’t think of any offhand, and most die a long, painful, lingering death.

There are so many reasons for a church’s death – occasionally, people in a rural setting simply aren’t there anymore when the whole town shuts down; in an urban setting, sometimes the neighborhood becomes commercial or industrial and houses are pulled down and replaced with a mall or a factory. But mostly, I suspect, the church simply fails to listen, obey and fulfill its mission – to go into the world and make disciples. When it doesn’t do that, it lets Christ down; He pulls the plug.

A couple of days ago, I was thinking about the parable of the talents ¹. We always think of it being applied to individuals, but I started wondering if it could be applied to a church. Do churches fit into this pattern? I think so.

Here’s the précis: Some fit the 1-talent mold: they’re holding a great gift, but they’re clueless about what to do with it. They don’t want to risk losing what they have, so they bury the chance for success. Some fit the 2-talent mold: they take the risk and they find expansion happens, even though their situation isn’t ideal – they used what they were given to great effect. Then there are some that are 5-talent churches: they’re in an ideal position – they have the geography and the population, the leadership is just right and they act on it. They experience tremendous growth – in evangelism, in discipleship, in missions, in spiritual vitality.

Let me flesh that out after the Scripture:

There are churches that have been ‘doing church’ for so long it has become a habit, rather than a mission. New people aren’t searched for, or even delighted in when they arrive – they’re tolerated, and that only if they stay inside the boundaries that the church currently maintains. But the most terrifying thing of all is change. For these institutions, any change at all is anathema – someone in the congregation will object: “It’s not the way we do things here!” – so if change is suggested by anyone foolish enough to risk it, the suggestion is quickly squashed. Things that annoy people may cause them to leave, and 1-talent churches are too small and frail to be able to afford someone leaving. However, people must leave in the end, and as the oldest of the congregation are carried out, the congregation dwindles slowly into dust…and their talent is taken from them – they buried it, quite literally, in their coffins.

Then there are the 2-talent churches that really ‘get’ their mission, but may be positioned away from the big population centers and so don’t get the huge numbers of people that the mega-churches do. But they get to work anyway, and they apply creativity to their situation where they are; they embrace change as not just inevitable but also useful. They listen to the Word and the Spirit; they do some things with future growth in mind; they steal ideas and look at how ‘big’ churches model innovation – and they connect to the culture around themselves and in so doing reach others…and their 2 talents become 4.

Finally there are the 5-talent churches. Mega-churches have gotten a bad rap these days, but I have to wonder how much of this is fueled by jealousy or belief that it happened by some sleight-of-hand. Ministry shouldn’t be a competition; it should be a partnership. This is a race we’re all in, not as competitors but as a relay team. God forbid we should decide that other churches are ‘the enemy’ – hasn’t Satan won then? Isn’t that exactly what he wants? Get us to fighting against each other and we won’t have time to bring people to Christ.

The 5-talent church has the highest strengths, but also the greatest responsibilities. So many of these churches are in high-population areas, and for them, the following holds true:

• Big business thrives in the big cities; big business seeks out and draws in high-performers and makes them live in proximity.
• High performers (Christian or not) want to excel – at maximizing income, fame, influence or anything else they see as their target. So they move to the cities.
• Some high-performers are great leaders; all great leaders are high-performers. The city holds many great leaders.
• Some great leaders are Christians, go to church, and become involved in their church’s missions.
• A church, like every other endeavor, grows fastest under great leadership.
• A church can only grow when it reaches out.
• Churches can grow fastest and largest where there is the highest population to reach out to – in the cities.
• Cities hold the densest population of broken people – some on the streets, some going there, some lost in other ways.
• Christ seeks to heal, to comfort, to meet needs and to draw others to Himself.
• Christ uses the church to do this.
• The Spirit will guide the obedient church into developing ministries to fulfill Christ’s desire.
• Big lostness requires a big response, which in turn requires big resources. The Spirit (an infinite resource Himself!) can marshal those resources through organizations willing to obey sacrificially.

Christ has always put a premium on healing the lost and broken – unfortunately His church has often felt they were a nuisance. 2-talent churches – and 5-talent churches even more – must and do put themselves in the role of the Samaritan rather than the priest or the Levite².

The only real difference in our parable between the servant who got 2 talents and the one that was given 5 talents is that their master favored the latter – presumably because he recognized higher potential – there was something greater that the 5-talent servant was capable of. The only difference between a 2-talent church and a 5-talent church is that the 5-talent church has similarly been granted access to greater resources – planted in a city, perhaps, rather than a rural area. There is no difference in the effort each put in – both doubled the original talents entrusted to them.

And the reward for each was identical. The master said, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.”

We may not be called to be a 5-talent church – but that better not stop us from being a 2-talent church. When the Master in question is God, entering into His joy is beyond understanding!

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I was watching the pre-show about THE NINES the other day, and watching the viewer counter. At one point it rose to 310 simultaneous viewers. Not bad as an indicator of an event that only began to be publicized 6 weeks earlier! Here’s some other info:

• The schedule assumes 9 hours of transmission – there’s 8.62 hours of raw footage already. I must say I’m a little surprised, since there are some 75 speakers, and who ever heard of anybody that ever got up into a pulpit to speak for less than the allotted time! My guess would have been for 75*9/60 = 11.25 hours – but they’ve got the files.
• Some 7,000 people have signed up to watch. And if I’m any indication, that only includes the signer-uppers, not all the additional people who are going to show up by invitation to watch.
• There will be some live cut-ins at the top and bottom of each hour – sounds like the Catalyst conference is going to do some advertising then.
• There is no schedule for the day yet – they may push one out during the day. This is a bit disappointing – while I want to find new people to listen to, I’d also like to know when people I’ve heard of (but never actually heard) will be on.
• It will be pushed at streaming quality (500 Kbps), not at satellite quality for most people.
• Recordings will be posted after the conference.

I’ll probably be blogging the conference here at Praise Christian Fellowship in CT – let me know in the comments if you’d like to join us.

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